The Lullaby Trust

The challenge

The Lullaby Trust had been working for years with a website that didn’t clearly explain who they were or what they did. It had a dated look and feel and was difficult to navigate: the homepage had three navigation menus, a repeated ask for donations and superfluous white space on both sides that made the text-heavy central section feel even more cluttered.

The brief

The Lullaby Trust asked us to produce a site that improved their KPIs in key areas such as bounce rate, time spent on site and number of returning visitors. They wanted the design to have a calming effect on users and inspire action right from the first moment you land on a page. They recognised that two of the site’s most important aspects, the shop and the donations process, were unwieldy and anything but user friendly, and asked us to totally overhaul them with their majority mobile audience in mind.

Our approach

User research was at the heart of the approach we took with this website. After our initial investigation into their existing site analytics, competitive landscape and target audiences, we held a workshop with the Lullaby Trust team to better understand the subject matter and the organisation’s personality. Working with the Trust to source real website users, we then held focus groups to validate and enhance our findings, incorporating them into our final designs.

Our solution

One key output of this UX research was that we infused a sense of positivity and optimism in the site’s look and feel, which was important to users and the Lullaby Trust alike. We achieved this by using their bright brand colours throughout the site and adding playful shapes, icons and design elements.

The Lullaby Trust provides a lot of information and support in diverse fields and it was important for this to be represented on the homepage. As a response, we kept the split navigation, holding a lively card sorting exercise with different stakeholders to organise and name the menu items. We added a bold, clear strapline in response to research that showed users of the old site couldn’t immediately tell what the Lullaby Trust did and felt disengaged as a result.

Our thorough UX phase helped us define the Lullaby Trust’s new primary and secondary navigation menus. This menu is pinned as you scroll down the page, which helps users quickly navigate to other information they need, and also means that there is always the option to get help in case they become distressed while reading.

We put the same level of consideration into the rest of the site’s structure, where we have balanced inspiration, information and support to make sure that the entire site works for all its different users. Our UX research showed us that the Lullaby Trust’s users felt they simply didn’t know their different options for getting involved, so we made this a prominent feature of the homepage.

Donations solution

We designed a seamless donations journey that highlights the impact a user’s donations will have. We focused our research on understanding exactly what should be featured; for example, putting a quantifiable human result to Lullaby Trust’s work through the statistic “20,000 babies’ lives saved.” This is a powerful statement that really motivates users to get involved and shows the organisation’s genuine impact.